Sunday, September 02, 2007

Cats I loved

My Niece Ann Margaret has a cat called Squeak. Apparently it’s her daughter Abi’s cat, but we are not sure. What I am sure of is, the cat has a personality disorder. It goes to its litter tray, does a wee shit, and then instead of scratching the litter over the shit, it turns around and scratches at the wall.

It completely ignores the smelly wee shit and stands for at least three minutes making eye contact with me, challenging me to look away or comment and paws at the wall. I got fed up with this madness; I jumped down, grabbed its paw firmly and made scratching movements that covered the litter over the shit with its reluctant leg.

It struggled and meowed, then bit me. Then it turned around and hopped into the litter tray and determinedly squeezed out another wee shit, it stared at me again and scratched at the wall in defiance.

The wall is all scraped, the shit is uncovered and it merely sniffed at me, spat in my direction and padded out of the room.Four year old Abi came through, she said to me “Stop making Squeak angry, he just bit me and that’s because you are here, he hates you, he doesn’t like touching his own poo….would you?”

She is right, I wouldn’t like touching my own poo, but I am not a cat- it is supposed to cover its own poo up.

I once had a cat called Twinkles who was the complete opposite; he would shit, then stand for about 40 minutes and completely scoop ALL the litter and the shit out of his box and spread it all over my hallway. We would lie in bed and in the middle of the night all you could hear was this “Sshh, sshhh, sshhh, sshh” noise for fucking hours as he stood there dementedly, doggedly scooping out the litter box.

You would think he was trying to dig to Australia the way he went about his business. I am sure he had OCD, if I screamed at him he would stop momentarily with a paw poised in mid air, then immediately went back to flicking the litter and shit all over my floor. He was like a cat possessed; my hall way resembled a scabby beach, all grit and small bits of shit over it. It took ages to clean it up and he sat watching me doing it every time.Maybe he liked the sound of the Hoover? I am not sure.

Once he had managed to empty the tray, he looked at the mess all over the floor and then sat happily licking his own arse and wiping his face, congratulating himself on a job well done. This was EVERY shit and piss.

So I constructed a box with high sides and a roof.I watched as he went in for his daily piss and scatter routine, it drove him crazy, the poor fucker was in there for ages and I could hear him scratch and flick those wee gritty stones up against the sides of that box for ages. Finally he came out covered in white flecks; like he had been to a cat wedding and was covered in confetti…he was totally confused.

Finally he would stand at the entrance and try to scoop all the litter out through his front legs into his hind quarters, but it never worked. He stalked around the box and you could see he was trying to work a way getting all the grit out of the box. He never did manage it and finally gave up his cat OCD-ness and took to licking the lampshade in my bedroom and that eventually fell apart due to the sheer amount of cat saliva it had soaked up.

Then Twinkles moved on to having a deeply sexual relationship with the velvet armchair in my sitting room. It was embarrassing to watch.

He just seemed to pass one obsession up for another, and then he completely surprised me by going missing one night. He never left the house in his life and it scared me, but even more surprising was the night he gave birth to three kittens and made me realise he was a SHE.I should have known I suppose.

Twinkles eventually got adopted out when my daughter Ashley was born, because the cat decided that Ashley’s crib and preferably her tummy was the perfect place to piss on nightly. I loved her, but had to stop her from trying to piss on the baby constantly.

I am sure she had fun wherever she went and miss her to this day, though my Hoover doesn’t. Her OCD behaviour broke three Hoovers in six years with the sheer amount of litter that passed through its pipes.